computer chips

Bismuth Telluride Valley doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but a new discovery may mean the end of silicon chips. After decades of using Bi₂Te₃ for its thermoelectric properties, researchers have discovered new properties of the material that paves the way for bismuth telluride chips constructed to power quantum computers.

About every two years, transistors shrink in size enough to place double the number on an integrated circuit than was possible during the previous two years. Its held true since the mid-1960s when the idea was first posited by Gordon E. Moore (today, its called Moores Law). If you were to plot the rate on a graph, youd see it come out as an exponential curve. Exponential curves start slowly and then ramp up quickly, theoretically approaching a limit but never reaching it. I say theoretically because in the very practical real world, a limit will always be reached due to environmental feedback. In silicon-based computing (what we use today), that limit may be only four years away.

Dartmouth College researchers have created a robot so small that 200 of them could fit on the tip of your finger. The tiny machine crawls like an inchworm across a grid at the breakneck speed of 200 microns per second. Its goal: to fix really little things. Dartmouth engineer Bruce Donald says swarms of such devices could one day repair circuitry in computer chips.